A denser, more nameless kind of fear swam over my light. I found myself looking around at the walls as it hit me we only had Feigran’s word that this place was empty. We could have tripped alarms already and not even known.
I felt Dalejem thinking about all of that, too.
He stood close to me again, so I felt the confusion of emotions in his light. He’d come to the same conclusions I had, though. On the big stuff, at least.
This was Shadow’s bunker. He’d had it built to protect his people, once he decided to pull the final trigger, whatever that ended up being.
Nuclear war, probably.
I couldn’t fathom the why…but then I’d never been able to, not when it came to the Dreng. I got the bare bones. A new world. Run their way, according to their rules. Humans and seers all slaves. Yadda, yadda. Shadow would control infrastructure and the social order, probably even some semblance of his perversion of religion.
He would breed the humans who remained like cattle. The seers he allowed to live would act as light collectors for the Dreng, just like the Rooks always had in the Pyramid.
There would be a new Pyramid. A stronger one, with fewer on the outside.
None, probably, if the Dreng got their way.
Feeding pools. Wires. More slavery.
I felt Dalejem sigh, a purring clicking kind of sound.
Then he was pushing gently on Feigran’s hands and light, getting him to back off of his person and then off the door with his body and aleimi. I felt Feigran let go of Dalejem reluctantly, and that time, that clingy vibe I’d noticed grew more intense.
“Don’t make me go alone,” Feigran said, soft.
“All right, brother,” Dalejem murmured. “We won’t. We will go all go in together now, yes? We will find these beings who were left behind…we will help them.”
Feigran nodded seriously.
I could see him through the Barrier again, his light-formed eyes focused intently on both me and Dalejem in turns. I could tell he wanted to catch hold of Dalejem’s arm again…or any part of him, really…but he seemed to sense that he’d been given a command.
Dalejem moved towards the door then.
“Pardon me, brother,” he said to Feigran courteously.
I watched as Feigran slid out of the way.
Again, I felt a pulse of arousal off him. That time, it was unmistakably aimed at Dalejem. I bit my lip, knowing my humor primarily came from nerves. Even so, Dalejem must have felt something because he gave me a hard look.
“Not one fucking word,” he warned me, his eyes flickering towards Feigran. “I mean it.”
Still fighting to hide my smile, I nodded.
Grunting, Dalejem turned back towards the door.
He tried the handle, jiggling it with a muscular hand. Locked. Then I felt him looking for the mechanism with his sight, probably trying to determine if it was an organic lock, something he could use his aleimi to open.
It wasn’t. I could see the dead metal mechanism.
In less than a second, Dalejem came to the same conclusion. Looking over his shoulder, I felt him focus back on me.
“Sister?” he said, still polite. “If you would?”
I frowned.
Of course, I’d come in here thinking I would have to use my telekinesis at some point. It was the main reason I’d been fairly confident I could do the scouting thing on my own, with just Feigran with me. Now that I’d admitted to myself that this bunker belonged to Shadow, however, I found myself hesitating.
I hadn’t forgotten what Shadow’s constructs tended to do to telekinetics who tried to use their powers without permission. The few times Revik tested his light against Shadow’s constructs hadn’t ended great for him…even though he’d once managed to turn that back around on Shadow, wresting control of that construct in New York.
Dalejem must have felt my hesitation.
“I don’t believe you’re at risk here,” he said, soft. “I don’t feel a construct like that here…and I’ve looked at the records in New York and Argentina extensively.” He hesitated, then added, “Further, I believe Revik was vulnerable to them in a way you are not. It is part of why Shadow fears you, I suspect.”
Thinking about his words, I nodded.
I agreed with him, for the most part.
Still, it only reassured me a little.
Dalejem shrugged. I saw that through the Barrier, too.
“We could come back,” he said, his voice still low. “I would be very comfortable with us coming back down here with a larger force, sister…with a real military plan.” At my silence, he added, “We breached it. We know it is real. What could be the harm in coming back with more than simply the two of us? It would allow us to gain more lights on this space, if nothing else.”
I felt him thinking about the fact that we hadn’t been able to feel the compound from aboveground. I felt him wonder just how much our light relied on Feigran’s even now, and realized that fact hadn’t escaped him, either. I knew as well as Dalejem did that there had to be some kind of construct here…or something that blocked our light. A door, thick or not, wouldn’t have made any kind of difference. Physical distance meant nothing in the Barrier.
Well, almost nothing. At these distances it meant very little.
Whatever blocked us, there was a good chance that, of the three of us, only Feigran had found a way to circumvent it.
I felt Dalejem agree with me.
I also felt his misgivings about our ability to come back here.
Like me, he had a sneaking suspicion that this complex wouldn’t be so easy to breach the second time. Like me, he had absolutely nothing to base that on. Zip.
It was just a feeling. But it felt true. To me, too.
Even as I thought it, Feigran shook his head.
“No,” he said, his voice a loud whisper. “No! We cannot come back! We cannot. One time. One time only…the door closes. The door closes, sister…” He made a slicing gesture with one hand, raising his voice. “Bang! Bang! Bang! It closes…”
When Dalejem caught hold of his arm, using his aleimi to try and calm his light, Feigran’s voice dropped to a softer whimper.
“It closes,” he breathed. “It closes…we can’t come back. Now or never! Put up or shut up!”
I heard Dalejem let out an involuntary snort.
He didn’t argue with Feigran. Instead I felt his light focus back on mine.
Feeling the question there, I sighed.
“I agree,” I said simply. “We can’t come back. I don’t know why…but we can’t.”
Reluctance whispered off Dalejem’s light.
Even so, I felt him agree, too.
“Fine,” he said, exhaling. “Then perhaps you could open the door for us, sister? If we’re going to do this, I’d prefer we did it quickly.”
Biting the inside of my cheek, I nodded.
Taking a jerking step closer, I put my own hand on the door. I didn’t touch the handle, but placed my bare palm and fingers on the metal above where the handle sat. Now that I was closer, I could feel the barest whisper of life in that metal.
Not shielded, exactly, but maybe…asleep.
But how was that possible?
“I don’t know,” Dalejem said, clicking softly as he shook his head. “I really don’t.”
“Take imprints,” I told him quietly. “As many as you can.”
My voice sounded more decisive than I felt.
Even so, my light felt significantly more focused, too. If Feigran was right, we needed to collect as much intel about this place as we possibly could. We wouldn’t get a second chance.
Even as I thought it, I triggered the telekinesis.
I did it softly, only using the bare minimum I needed to invade the lock mechanism. Splitting my consciousness, I focused a lesser part of my light on the bolt I could now feel embedded in the stone wall and the rest on that dormant organic.
If I set off an alarm in here, I wanted to know. Right away.
Once I had my higher structures in that wall, I discovered that the stone wall wasn’t really stone…but I couldn’t think about that now, either.
So I took a snapshot of it with my light.
I told myself I’d do the same with the rest of this structure on our way out.
Well, assuming we were able to get out at all.
Pain rippled through me as I had a sudden flash of memory of Revik working with me, teaching me more advanced techniques for using the telekinesis on non-organics. He’d been so fucking good at it. Every time he demonstrated something, I couldn’t help getting turned on. Each and every damned time. We’d ended up having sex at the close of most of those lessons. Really fucking hot sex…usually more than once.
Well, before Dubai, anyway.
Gritting my teeth, I focused back on the panel.
Skirting most of the sleeping organics I felt hibernating inside those walls, I pinpointed all of the contact points of the mechanism itself.
Seconds later, I used the telekinesis to shove open the lock bar manually.
I didn’t hear the click when one lock receded into the door, the other into the wall…but I felt it somewhere in the higher areas of my light.
Sending a soft ping to Dalejem, I twisted the handle…
And opened the door.
13
EXPECTED
The lights ignited, the second I swung the door inward.
They blinded me after so much time in the dark, forcing me to throw up an arm while my eyes adjusted. The change was so sudden I’d already clicked into a defensive reaction with my light, thickening the shield around the three of us even as I ignited a few more layers of the telekinesis.
Behind me, I felt more than saw Dalejem aiming the gun to cover us.
He slid sideways in the next few seconds, so that he could cover me from the other side, as well as Feigran, who walked in last, still hooked to Dalejem’s belt via the organic cord.
Nothing greeted us but silence.
Eventually I lowered my arm. I still squinted a little, but by then as much from the light in my irises as from the light of the room, which now struck me as pretty moderate. Looking around though, I felt another wave of disbelief.
Whatever I’d expected to find on the other side of the door, it wasn’t this.
There were no green organic tiles, no cages or restraints. No stainless steel lab tables stood by mirrored walls and I didn’t see any cloth-covered trays with horror movie lab instruments. No blood stains on the floor…no floor drains, either.
The room wasn’t a room at all.
Instead a long, wide, high-ceilinged corridor stretched in front of us, lined on either side with what looked like storefronts.
Like an underground main street, but with no one home.
So yeah, not a corridor at all…an actual street.
My eyes slid down the length of the dome-ceilinged space, pausing on a few individual stores, noting their names. There was a nail salon, a yoga studio, a French restaurant, a music store. I saw what looked like an electronics store, fully stocked according to the display window and the signage. My eyes paused again on a gourmet coffee shop with tables and chairs out front and even a chalkboard sandwich board on an A-frame easel. That’s when I noticed someone had planted trees in here, and that a lot of the lights came from what looked like UV bulbs meant to approximate sunlight, probably to keep those trees alive.
I don’t know if our entrance triggered it, but I also heard water flowing. My eyes found a fountain in a small alcove between the nearest restaurant and that gourmet coffee shop.
I looked at Dalejem, raising an eyebrow.
“Huh,” I said.
He gave me a grim look, then motioned with the rifle down the thoroughfare.
“They’re that way,” he said.
I nodded, confirming the aleimic signatures with my light.
I took a snapshot of those signatures and their location…then proceeded to do the same with every aspect I could sniff out of the scene before us, using my eyes, ears, nose and light. Assuming we got out of here alive, I wanted to be able to send Balidor and the others every creepy detail of whatever this was.
The aleimic signatures of our quarry felt a lot clearer now, even more than they had when we first entered through that stairwell door. I could even get a rough head count now, at least of the beings we were being allowed to feel.
Not like I thought there were necessarily more things alive down here…but I definitely wasn’t ruling it out. This place may not be full-fledged Hall of Mirrors yet, like the other constructs of Shadow’s we’d encountered, but I had zero doubt it would be once it was switched on and occupied for real.
Even now, it wasn’t exactly devoid of weirdness…even apart from the fact that it existed at all and the sheer, astronomical size of it. Thinking about the size again, I remembered not being able to find the boundaries with my light as we walked down those stairs. I knew part of that might be illusion, too…but I also wondered if we would have found similar “villages” behind the doors we’d passed on the other floors.
Even now, I couldn’t feel how far this segment stretched in front of us. I could feel areas off to either side, but I had no way to gauge their boundaries, either.
For now, my light and my instincts told me we were pretty much alone. The work crews who set this place up still lingered in the aleimic imprints, but I felt no one else. Anyway, this place was too showroom-perfect to be occupied. Too dead-feeling.
Or no, not dead…waiting.
It felt like it was waiting.
I couldn’t help thinking it wouldn’t be waiting much longer, though.
“Agreed,” Dalejem said next to me, soft. “I think not long at all, Esteemed Bridge.”
I glanced at him, but didn’t comment.
Biting back the misgiving that swam through my light, what bordered on full-blown fear now, I clenched my jaw. I knew the chances of Shadow’s people showing up here now, when we happened to be here, had to be in the millions-to-one category.
I hadn’t ruled out alarms, though. Or other automatic security features.
Someone must be guarding this place…somehow.
Unless Shadow wanted us here. Unless Feigran really was a plant.
Shoving the thought out of my mind more forcefully, I drew my weapon from the thigh holster I wore and began to walk. Immediately, I felt Dalejem pacing me, his own, much larger gun propped on his shoulder. I couldn’t feel anything at all on him now, which didn’t surprise me. He was ex-Adhipan after all, and whatever he might be thinking about this, it probably wouldn’t help either of us to discuss it now.
Thinking about that, I made another decision.
“Ten minutes to locate them,” I said, looking at Dalejem. “Then we’re on our way out.” Seeing his green eyes staring at mine, I made a gesture with the hand holding a gun. “We have to assume they have alarms down here,” I added. “Someone will be coming.”
Dalejem nodded, once.
Still, I felt a whisper of something else on his light.
I suspected I knew what it meant. He doubted that anyone was coming for the same reason I did. They simply didn’t see us as a threat.
Perhaps we were even being offered an unguided tour.
A glimpse into things to come.
“Agreed,” Dalejem breathed, still holding up the gun as he walked soundlessly to my right. “I think that is most accurate, sister…well, except perhaps the last part. I think we are definitely not a threat to them…not in their mind, at least.”
I gave a noncommittal grunt, not taking my eyes off the store front windows, or my fingers off the flat part of my gun barrel just above the trigger.
“Are we a threat to them in yours?” I said, my voice sarcastic.
Dalejem’s voice remained serious.
“I think we are…expected,” he said.
“By Sha
dow?” I said.
Dalejem shook his head, but not entirely in a no. I saw him frown, as if trying to catch some scent in the Barrier that eluded him.
“By someone,” he said after a pause. “I do not know if it is Shadow himself.”
I looked at Feigran.
The auburn-haired rocked on his heels, gazing up at the ceiling, his mouth hardened in concentration. He’d started humming again, muttering every few seconds between the longer breaths. I doubted he knew he was doing either.
Apparently Dalejem had given up on silencing him.
Aware that my fear was starting to affect my concentration, I slipped even deeper into military mode, maybe as a means of controlling it. Taking my eyes back over the row of storefronts, I frowned at a window filled with small manikins wearing children’s and baby’s clothes. I knew once this place was lit up, it would likely be filled with virtual ads as well as the more old-fashioned display cases like I could see now. Still, something about those child-sized manikins with fake blue eyes and wide-spread arms was deeply disturbing.
Turning over Dalejem’s words, I nodded, once.
“You think we should leave now?” I murmured.
Dalejem shook his head. “No,” he said. “No…it is too late for that. But we should be very careful about not doing whatever it is we are being guided to do down here.”
I nodded to that, too, biting my lip.
“Agreed,” I said.
…Assuming it’s not too late for that already, my mind muttered.
Dalejem glanced at me.
I don’t know if it was because he’d heard my mind’s snarky addendum, or some other reason. I didn’t ask, but continued to case the buildings as we passed.
Feigran huddled just behind us, keeping pace despite the smaller length of his steps. Clutching his fingers and hands together at around chest-height, he looked into the windows of stores whenever I glanced back, his eyes round, his sculpted mouth pressed into a small line.
“Laboratory,” he muttered. “Rats in tunnels…rats…food for ghosts…”
It frightened me that I understood that.
Fighting back the panic that wanted to pool adrenaline in my gut, I sent my light out ahead, right as we passed another restaurant, an old-fashioned style Italian place. The tables had checkered tablecloths complete with wicker-wrapped wine bottles coated in different-colored candle wax. It reminded me of places I’d been to with Jon in the Village of New York, what felt like a million years ago now.
Dragon: Allie's War Book Nine Page 26